By 1976, the song “Fever,” written by Otis Blackwell and Eddie Cooley, had been subject to all manner of interpretation. Little Willie John recorded it first, in 1956, and two years later Peggy Lee applied her own, lasting gloss—to the Read More …

Fifty years ago this month, at a time when America was divided on questions of war, race, and gender, Alice de Rivera decided that she was fed up with her lousy high school in New York. She was thirteen, with Read More …

In 2016, the multidisciplinary artist Devin Kenny’s work was screened in a video program at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Hito Steyerl, one of the show’s more established artists, forfeited her fee so that others could have Read More …

This year’s Country Music Association Awards began on Wednesday night with Garth Brooks—who, at fifty-six, inhabits the role of country music’s wise elder statesman—calling for a moment of silence to honor the memory of the twelve people who were gunned Read More …

“Hive Mind,” the fourth album from the Internet, released last week, is a perfect misnomer of a title. This is not a project that feeds the mythology of a band as a single, hovering intelligence, with its members guided into Read More …

In June, the restaurant chain IHOP caused a big to-do when it announced that it was changing its name to IHOb, in order to make clear to customers that it was not simply a breakfast joint. It was obviously a Read More …

A lost pair of lovers were recently rediscovered in a thirty-second silent film titled “Something Good – Negro Kiss.” The footage, which has been newly added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, shows a series of Read More …

“Murder On My Mind,” the biggest single by the Florida rapper YNW Melly, is an exercise in contrasts. He waxes about taking someone’s life as if the act were akin to making love, describing in exacting detail how he wakes Read More …

The bleakness of early winter—the short, hazy days, the bony trees, the way the sky grows dense and unanimated, a sagging gray blanket—can, on the right day, seem nearly funny. “Death smiles at us all; all we can do is Read More …

“I think we’re going to serve McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, with some pizza,” Donald Trump told the press in an interview on Monday morning, discussing the White House’s planned banquet that night for the Clemson University Tigers, in celebration of Read More …